this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
2057 points (93.5% liked)

Fuck Cars

9666 readers
59 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Mostly dirt, but that dirt is also something that has to be travelled over to get between the people…and the scale of the US means there’s a lot more of it to span.

Inside a city electric trains make more sense, but unlike the EU there are very few places in the US between population centers that could economically support the infrastructure needed for high speed rail.

For example, Texas is roughly the size of France, but with only a third of the population, and hundreds of miles between population centers, none of which could expect to see the amount of travel needed to justify that much rail line.

Basically, take Europe and their economically viable rail line, get rid of 3/4 of the population and 3/4 of the cities so each stop is 3 to 4 times further away from each other and ask the people running the trains if they would still be profitable considering they’re still having to cover the same distances with a 1/4 of the income.